


Tastes Like Home

by LelithSugar



Category: Kingsman (Movies)
Genre: Established Relationship, Feelings, First Kiss, First Person Narrator, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Getting Together, Heart-to-Heart, Hurt/Comfort, Love, M/M, Not Canon Compliant, Reunions, Romance, crying and holding and all that good stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-05
Updated: 2018-04-05
Packaged: 2019-04-18 23:08:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14223828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LelithSugar/pseuds/LelithSugar
Summary: Harry recalls his post-Kentucky reunion with Eggsy.I paused with the intention of an apology, or a question, but in his eyes was a strange blend of things I hadn't expected to see, if any of the situation had occurred with more than a split second’s forethought: confusion, certainly, and wonder, and acceptance, and - most damningly - hope.





	Tastes Like Home

**Author's Note:**

> Those who have read any of my Hartwin oneshots will notice that I favour a really ambiguous canon divergence in which Harry has both eyes and probably never ‘died’, and I've never gone into why partly because I don't want to and partly so that people can just slot it into their own headcanons as they wish, because it's not at all relevant to those stories.
> 
> That said, I have a number of feelings about a post-Sectet-Service-canon, TGC-doesn't-exist version of their reunion. Those feelings go a little like this.

 

Tastes Like Home

 

Coming home was easier than it had any right to be. One heavily disruptive afternoon formed all I was to have of a “phased return” to work, other than the necessary adaptations to my role. The questions, the answers, the apologies and the comforts were broadly the same for everyone and over surprisingly, mercifully quickly: there was only so much to be said. It was Eggsy, of course, who warranted the first private audience. That much was obvious, although what I actually intended to say to him became no more apparent however long I paced and fretted.

Was there any sense apologising? For leaving him in his hour of greatest need, and for the painful radio silence whilst I recovered from the surgery and patched up the lapses in my memory? None regarding him, for good or ill, just inconsequential things like my address, my date of birth, my mother’s maiden name, but I wasn't trying to access telephone banking, so it made no odds to me. The heartstopping hurt on Eggsy’s face I recalled in minute detail. I didn’t have a lot of hope for forgiveness on that front.

Should I thank him? For ensuring there was a world for me to wake up in? For still being there for me to try to make things right with?

It all seemed ridiculous, and the cab ride was nothing but tense, if strangely comfortable silence and the occasional stilted breath as one or the other of us thought of something to say and then reconsidered, and he opened my door with his own key.

“I cancelled your veg,” were Eggsy’s first words to me in my home. Within them the admission of what I had gathered already: that he had been living there and more or less kept the place as a shrine. “I didn't know where the money were coming out of, and I weren't getting through it, so I just. Yeah.” 

I was silent as he carried my bags in, pointed out changes: he’d coaxed a flower out of a plant I’d presumed dead since the previous winter, most notably.  The second bedroom was obviously being lived out of, mine freshly made up for me although I could not shake the feeling it had been slept in, at some point. 

He stopped, eventually, when we’d returned to the safe neutral ground of the living room and I think he realised I'd not spoken more than the odd murmur of gratitude. Eggsy waited, to hear what I had to say for myself, or to him, considering the fathoms passed, and eventually it was something incredibly eloquent and meaningful like “oh. Well then.” 

“Oh for fuck’s sake Harry.” And Eggsy, for all my concern that he was going to want to fight me or simply storm back out - having reinstalled me safely - without another word, pulled me close and held me like I'd needed since I woke up. 

I hadn't realised how badly I'd craved the contact, to feel real and anchored within my own skin. I'd had hugs: from Merlin, Roxanne and James, from one exuberant American physiotherapist, but there had been no moment in which to embrace Eggsy, if he'd even accede to such a thing. There was clearly a reason he hung back shyly in the doorway when I made my reentrance, and I wouldn't have blamed him if he'd not wanted to be any more than necessarily civil with me after the way things had been left. What we had to say warranted a closed door, whatever it was.

But it appeared that in death I had been absolved. Heavens knows how any of it might have gone had things been different, but Eggsy had ended up an agent regardless, and I had come back and that seemed to be enough to render the argument moot without a further word so we simply clung to each other in my living room. For longer, quite plainly, than befitting colleagues... then friends... and beyond that the uncharted territory of what exactly Eggsy and I were to each other, what he meant to me, dictated no protocol and so we did not move. 

“I missed you,” he said into my shoulder, and I could feel the wet of tears against my neck, the heat of his breath even through wool and cotton, trapped like a burn.  I'd have been content to keep him there and stroke his back, let him hide there, let him conceal the vulnerability I could feel against my chest, but he stepped back to look me in the eyes and repeat it. “I missed you. So, fucking much.” 

He looked younger and older all at once, than the last time I’d stood facing him: more worn, yet more childlike, and after all I had broken him down to be remade and then left with the job half done. Kingsman had made excellent work of honing him as an agent, and a gentleman, but I'd have been more of a fool than I was not to realise the hold I had over him, and with me there he had a chance to look for his answers.

Where he had once been in awe of me his pain had made him fearless. I was so struck dumb that I could only let him stare until he crumbled back into my arms, sobbing so hard and unguarded that I could feel it shudder through his ribs.  I wanted to wring it out of him. 

I'd done my crying, for the most part: ugly, frustrated bawling at my pain, my indignity, the state of the world that would so inevitably fail to learn from it all, yet again, to leave us in peace. The guilt was yet to fully materialise, and in fact never would to the extent people expected: I've been well trained and counselled, and in truth I've killed better people. Forty-odd murders for which the blame rested firmly on someone else were nothing on seeing the pain that grieving for me had caused him, let alone doing so having been left on a terse promise that I would never come back to fulfil. I did not deserve to cry for myself, then: after all, I had awoken to a world in which he lived and thrived, battered and exhausted but victorious. And he had done all that with the burden of my loss on his shoulders. Despite myself, I felt my throat harden. 

“Swear down Harry, I thought you was gone. Gone, and we never…Never even…”

“I'm here, Eggsy.” It was all I could offer him, all I was absolutely sure he wanted. 

All he did was whimper and press clos e r still,  as if he were trying to climb into me, which was only fair. I intended to let him cling for as long as he wanted, to hold him close and firmly until he had reasoned with the madness of our reality and accepted that I was truly in front of him as he would later confess to dreaming night after night; that I had really come home, to him. I thought at the time - and know, in hindsight - that I felt him push a spontaneous, lost kiss to the underside of my jaw: the nearest spot to him. Perhaps I should have read more into that than simple, brave touch, but perhaps not. Perhaps we knew as much as each other, then. 

I found myself looking into the glassy, impossibly clear green of his eyes. Thumbing the tears off his face, and I distinctly remember having the strangest urge to lick my hands and taste the salt. from there it was such a dreamlike, drunken slip to kiss them away from his cheeks that it took me a moment to realise I was not simply imagining that, but doing it, pressing my lips to the blades of his cheekbones and kissing the tears away as though it was somehow close to being able to put right having caused them. 

I pulled back with the intention of an apology, or a question, but in his eyes was a strange blend of things I hadn't expected to see, if any of the situation had occurred with more than a split second’s forethought: confusion, certainly, and wonder, and acceptance, and - most damningly - hope. I let my lips go to his cheek again, less precisely, to move with him as he shifted, to clumsily draw closer as he turned so that his lips were under mine, so that neither of us could ever be said to have made that exact move.  “ _ It just happened,” _ so they say,  _ “one thing led to another,” _ in the incredulous popular parlance, but it did in that mere moments after debating with myself whether it was too much to hold him close like that we were lip locked and breathing hard, stumbling towards my settee. 

For a moment I tried to convince myself it could have been relief, mistranslated by the heat of desperation, as though we'd succumbed to some unique madness brought on by the sheer  intensity of being reunited. I didn't dare hope it could be anything more, at first.I didn't dare second guess what he wanted, although it had been written plain in every time he'd looked at me. I knew. Still, some part of my brain wanted to front every argument possible, to dash my stupid soaring hopes and burn their wings off before my heart could get ideas, adamant that there was certain to be some other explanation for why even the urgent presses of lips had escalated, why I could feel his tongue against my teeth. 

But gradually the tears stopped and excitement took over. We broke apart breathless; one last, wordless checkpoint and then we kissed anew,  as lovers. 

I took him to bed, and the guilty difference in our ages and work and the agency be damned. 

He knew then I’d have given it up for him, that I’d die for him all over again although I think he'd have punched me if I'd said as much in so many words. Probably still would, for that matter, although our wedding vows contained something prosaically equivalent, because that is our truth, every day. With the exception of increasingly infrequent away missions, every day I fight by his side, or train or talk, but I work by his side. Every day I come home to our house and our dogs and I eat and wash and sleep and live, with him. Every day I notice some new grey hair, new wrinkle or spot or ache,  _ his _ first grey hair - and you can rest assured I had the appropriate and proportional crisis about that moment - which reminds me of what we should have done, of what might have been, what might still be, and what we are. 

And every day I am grateful. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> "But where's the smut, Lelith?"  
> I got ya, fam. Now I've got this out of my system everything in my drafts is unsurrisingly full throttle smut and normal service will be resumed shortly. Do let me know if you liked this one, though.


End file.
